ArticleBMJ open2022
Probability of males to outlive females: an international comparison from 1751 to 2020.
Article in BMJ open, 2022. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 4 papers.
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Who cites it
4 citing papers in PubMed.
- Genetic predisposition to longer lifespan, lifestyle factors, and all-cause mortality: a 17-year prospective cohort study.GeroScience · 2026Article
- Deriving and comparing healthy longevity distributions by gender and health prevalence measures: a statistical moments and maximum entropy approach.Population health metrics · 2026Article
- Treating sex and gender differences as a continuous variable can improve precision cancer treatments.Biology of sex differences · 2024Article
- Leading causes of death in Vietnamese Americans: An ecological study based on national death records from 2005-2020.PloS one · 2024Article
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
objectiveTo measure sex differences in lifespan based on the probability of males to outlive females.
designInternational comparison of national and regional sex-specific life tables from the Human Mortality Database and the World Population Prospects.
setting199 populations spanning all continents, between 1751 and 2020. PRIMARY OUTCOME MEASURE: We used the outsurvival statistic ( φ ) to measure inequality in lifespan between sexes, which is interpreted here as the probability of males to outlive females.
resultsIn random pairs of one male and one female at age 0, the probability of the male outliving the female varies between 25% and 50% for life tables in almost all years since 1751 and across almost all populations. We show that φ is negatively correlated with sex differences in life expectancy and positively correlated with the level of lifespan variation. The important reduction of lifespan inequality observed in recent years has made it less likely for a male to outlive a female.
conclusionsAlthough male life expectancy is generally lower than female life expectancy, and male death rates are usually higher at all ages, males have a substantial chance of outliving females. These findings challenge the general impression that 'men do not live as long as women' and reveal a more nuanced inequality in lifespans between females and males.
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